U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,867 to Wortmann et al., the entirety of which is hereby incorporated into the present application by reference, discloses a parking brake assembly that has a take-up member for taking up slack in a brake cable. The take-up member is spring biased to rotate the same in a cable take-up direction to pretension one or more brake cables attached thereto. In order to facilitate connection of the vehicle brake cable(s) to the take-up member, a lockout structure is provided. The '867 discloses the lockout structure in the form of either an axially displaceable pin, a spring, or a lockout pawl. The lockout structure engages the take-up member to retain the same against rotational movement, thereby eliminating the need to manually restrain the take-up member against spring-biased rotational movement during connection of the brake cable(s) thereto.
In the embodiments of the '867 patent, two steps are required to reset the lockout structure in the position wherein it retains the take-up member in the lockout position thereof to facilitate disconnection and subsequent reconnection of the brake cable during repair situations. In each embodiment, the repair technician is required to (a) apply tension to the brake cable opposite the brake activating direction thereof until the take-up member is rotated into the lockout position thereof, and (b) while maintaining the take-up member in the lockout position thereof, manually move the lockout structure into its operative position for retaining the take-up member in its lockout position. This can be extremely difficult to accomplish for one technician and routinely two technicians are employed to reset the lockout structure: one to apply the required tension to the cable and the other to manually move the lockout structure into its operative position.
Consequently, there exists a need in the art for a hand-operated parking brake actuating assembly that eliminates the difficulties encountered when attempting to reset the lockout structure of the aforementioned '867 patent.